thecrystalring - Tumblr blog

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Help a transman get top surgery!

Hey! I know I don't post personal stuff here too often, but I figured it can't hurt. I'm looking to get top surgery in July or August and I could use help with funding it. Please, if you have the means, consider throwing $20 my way, and if you don't, please consider boosting it. Anything helps, and it would mean a lot.

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Once upon a time...

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Playtime :]

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It's almost time for Zack and Cody's reservation at the Italian restaurant

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long exposure picture of a plane taking off

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dr. eggman should be a sex symbol on here. but you all want to watch succession. pathetic.

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wotw round 1

propaganda under the cut!

shen qingqiu:

Okay first a quick intro: Shen Qingqiu / Shen Yuan is the main character of SVSSS, and his deal is that he's a guy from the modern world who wakes up in the novel he read, in the body of one of the characters. Shen Yuan is his name in his original world, while Shen Qingqiu is the name of the character he became - that he uses for himself for most of the novel.

Now, what happened to him… The thing is, at the core of his woobification are his actual canon traits, but some fans really crank them up to the point where it becomes a disservice to the character. So you never know when someone saying "oh Shen Qingqiu is so oblivious" means "due to several intersecting factors Shen Qingqiu has some extremely specific blindspots regarding certain topics" (which is just true) or "haha Shen Qingqiu could get kissed by a man and still not realize that man has romantic feelings for him" (just one variation of the sentiment, but one i find particularly bewildering considering. in canon. a man kissing him was exactly what made Shen Qingqiu realize that man was actually in love with him. like my dudes the bar is low but its there!).

Stumbling into this second version in fic was funny a first few times, but now it's like… I genuinely can't tell whether any particular author is overplaying it for comedy, or genuinely believes the character is That dumb.

Also ppl often severely underestimate his power level. Like idk if that's because they compare him to the characters he often hangs out with, who are those genius top-of-the-world experts (despite him outpacing literally everyone else he ever fought against), or because of how he bungled his first-ever case (like, you know, two weeks after waking up in a whole NEW BODY, in a different world), or because he tends to downplay his own strength and also tries to avoid killing people… but like, this man took a technique that in the original was just "aesthetic and interesting" and developed it into something that could be super deadly within weeks, he's just not using it that way. And he also fixed og Shen Qingqiu's broken cultivation within the first few months of being in that body. So he's actually extremely talented and pretty strong, he just spends most of the book either nerfed by external factors (such as poison that disables his spiritual energy at random times) or surrounded by veritable powerhouses.

And this is for Shen Yuan-as-Shen Qingqiu. But the version that drives me completely up the wall is actually the portrayal of just Shen Yuan - in fanworks where he either never gets transported to the world of the novel, or wakes up as a different character. Because suddenly the traits that already get unduly amplified with Shen Qingqiu version become straight up caricature-like. He's not only oblivious to the extreme, he also gets painted as this completely naive soft babyboi (this is about a guy whose most well-known pre-transmigration canon trait is that he writes famously vitriolic rants about novels on the internet); plus, like, on the physical level, super frail and waifish which uh. wow. nice walking right back into the BL tropes the novel itself avoided?…… So yeah I'm super not keen on this portrayal. I know he doesn't appear as not-Shen Qingqiu version of himself in the novel, if we don't count the rant in the beginning, but like. please extrapolate from the character we actually have instead of writing this mega-woobie who shares nothing with the base version?

Terrible little bastard man who has a sad backstory but is actually genuinely a terrible person. Fans like to act like he is just a soft sad boi deep inside and make him lose all of his edge.

So the thing about Shen Jiu / og!Shen Qingqiu in canon is that we first learn of him as an unquestionably, almost cartoonishly villainous character. As in, he is literally a villain in the book our main character has been reading… before dying and waking up in the world of the book, as that very villain (hence the distinction of Shen Jiu being the "original" Shen Qingqiu, as our main character begins to use the name Shen Qingqiu for himself. Shen Jiu, however, is an old name that only the original has used). The original Shen Qingqiu that our main character knows is a serial child abuser in a teaching position, a murderer (killed his colleague, killed his old fiancee's entire family…), and a lecher (visited brothels and had designs on his female disciple).

Then, over the course of the novel, we learn more about Shen Jiu - in particular, that a number of things our MC "knew" about him were not true. He did not kill his colleague, but rather failed to save him, despite trying to; he killed his "fiancee"'s family because her older brother has abused him for years (and also, Shen Jiu was forced into agreeing to marry her), and also he only actually killed half of them (only men); he visited brothels because he only felt safe in the company of women, and he just went there to get a good night's sleep; and he only ever saw that female disciple he was accused of lusting after as a daughter. And in general, he had a horrible childhood, and was himself a victim of abuse.

However, not everything gets disproved. Shen Jiu still turned from a victim to perpetrator, abusing a child (coincidentally the protagonist of the og book) and trying to set him up to die/be killed several times. Canon is very clear on that point. The situation with Shen Jiu and the og book version of the protagonist is very much an illustration of cycles of abuse.

Also at a certain point, we meet the author of the in-world book, the one our MC was reading - who explains he scrapped Shen Jiu's tragic backstory because it would make him too controversial. Quoting from memory, something like: 'if you said he was a villain, he was also tragic; but if you said he was pitiful, he'd also done terrible things. All in all, a character like this was a hotbed for all kinds of fandom discourse.'

Prophetic fucking words.

Somehow, seeing all that, some 'fans' have decided to jump into a completely opposite direction: making Shen Jiu a poor little misunderstood meow meow who did nothing wrong ever and was a soft princess and totally was never mean to the protagonist ("the protagonist just has inflated sense of ego and misunderstood Shen Jiu's normal teaching as singling him out for abuse" was a take I had to see with my own two eyeballs. Theres btw an extra from Shen Jiu's pov where he laments that the fake manual he gave the kid has failed to horrifically kill him yet).

Which puts the rest of us in an awkward position of having to defend his canon assholery. Like, the whole point of this character is that he's complex! That he's both a villain and a victim! Reducing him to just one is doing him a disservice, and either extreme is equally incorrect! And this is something that happens with many similar characters, I know, but what boggles my mind about Shen Jiu's case in particular is that. it's spelled out. The whole deal with his character is spelled out in canon. And some people still go "oh so Shen Jiu was secretly the most morally pure and good character, got it". Like. how?????????????? ??? ?? ?????

noriaki kakyoin:

Uke-fied to the max so he can be shipped with jotaro lol

Ohmygod where do I even start. Kakyoin's the poster boy for twinkification and woobification of a canonically very capable, interesting (and not twinky at all) character who's so many things at once- a loyal friend, really smart, a bit of a weirdo, infodumping trivia at random times, quick-thinking in dangerous situations, reckless, polite and respectful, vengeful towards enemies but always kind to friends, depressed, determined and motivated in the face of mortal danger despite it all - even when he had the chance to leave the Stradust Crusaders and just come back to his normal life, he decided to stick with them. This decision eventually cost him his life since he got killed by Dio, the main villain. The fandom either calls him a cardboard with no personality (which is not true at ALL, where did that take even come from) or they downplay his canon badassery- Jotaro x Kakyoin shippers are often guilty of this along with twinkifying Kakyoin. The ship is fine, but they're way more interesting if you take into account their canon characterisation as huge weirdos who somehow work pretty well together- they're both different flavors of autistic that sometimes just so happen to align on the same wavelength.

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God is in his Heaven When I'm S-Scared! I'm selling this print at SPX this fall! Come say hi!

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horse whose hooves are stuck individually in different colored buckets the horse seems a bit surprised but unbothered the sign of a well mannered yet perhaps empty minded horse or perhaps this is all a goof of the horses own design

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It's been a while, but I drew more JoJo ponies à la MLP!!! This time of all the main JoJos hehe

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Making a shitty one-page RPG called Oh Shit It’s the Killer. The premise is simple: you’re a high schooler spending the weekend in the woods with your besties. The Killer is there also. He is trying to the Kill you

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i watch baseball for the side quests (ps: this baseball player also makes fruit cocktails midgame)

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Autism be damned my boy can work a grill

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Former Disney CEO Michael Eisner: doctor, I have depression

Kevin “Defunctland” Perjurer: go see the great clown Michael Eisner. He sucks shit and he knows it. He’s so bad at running a theme park he makes me roar with laughter. He cries at board meetings because he knows he’s nothing.

Former Disney CEO Michael Eisner: but doctor–

Kevin “Defunctland” Perjurer: I know who you are

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